Defending Gallipoli: The Turkish Story

DEFENDING

GALLIPOLI

The Turkish Story

DEFENDING

GALLIPOLI

The Turkish Story

HARVEY BROADBENT

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

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First published 2015

Text © Harvey Broadbent, 2015

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2015

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

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Cover design by Philip Campbell Design

Typeset by Megan Ellis

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Broadbent, Harvey, 1947– author.

Defending Gallipoli: The Turkish Story/Harvey Broadbent.

9780522864564 (paperback)

9780522864571 (ebook)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Turkey. Ordu—History—World War, 1914–1918.

World War, 1914–1918—Campaigns—Turkey—Gallipoli Peninsula.

Gallipoli Peninsula (Turkey)—History, Military.

940.426

CONTENTS

Preface

Note on Pronunciations and Definitions

1    Drifting to the Dardanelles

2    Confusion and Courage

3    Desperate Defence

4    ‘What on earth will happen, my Captain?’

5    Martyrs and Ceasefire

6    Deadlock

7    ‘Truly an apocalypse’

8    ‘All is confusion and the situation is grave’

9    ‘Keeping up the spirited efforts’

10   Slipping Away

Reflections

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography

Index

For the memory of those soldiers whose stories have not been told and who perished by the folly of others.

PREFACE

This book is the result of six years of intensive research in Turkish archives and translations of selected Turkish material. I published a much more detailed account with extensive examples of translated documents in a reference book, Gallipoli: The Turkish Defence. Much of the original material itemised in that book I leave to be interpreted by military historians and tacticians. Defending Gallipoli, on the other hand, is designed to provide a flowing story of the Turks at Gallipoli and how they came to successfully defend that small area of their homeland against the might of imperial British and French naval and land forces. As space and time prevents a comprehensive history from both sides of the conflict, here we view the campaign directly from the Turkish perspective—from the other side of no-man’s land.

The details of the Turkish defence at Gallipoli offer strong evidence for a number of assertions about the Turkish operations and a greater understanding of how they contributed to the outcomes at Gallipoli. My observations of these are frequently summarised at the end of chapters and in the short ‘Reflections’ section at the end. Both Turkey and Australia appreciate the importance of the Gallipoli Campaign for their national identities and ideals. So this book is partly a response to that common interest and the need to provide a factual account of events not covered in earlier Gallipoli accounts.

Most books about the conflict, many admirable in their own strengths, have been generally confined to the campaign from the Allied perspective. This book describes the major Turkish operations at Gallipoli that have, apart from the notable academic work of American military historian Edward Erickson, been missing from books about the campaign. Hopefully it helps fill that gap and brings about more understanding of how the operations of the Ottoman forces affected the outcomes of this campaign. By detailing the operations of the other side we gain a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that led to the failure of the Anzacs and their allies at Gallipoli.

It was only after 2003 that I gained access to The Turkish General Staff Military History and Strategic Institute archives, known by the Turkish acronym ATASE. Here I found a treasure trove of primary source material, and the earliest finds were used in my previous book Gallipoli: The Fatal Shore (Penguin-Viking, 2005). Several years on I have accessed the archives further and sourced a wider range of Turkish sources. This work was made possible by a partnership between Australian and Turkish organisations to mark the centenary of the Gallipoli Campaign. They are the result of the Gallipoli Centenary Research Project established by Macquarie University and myself with partners, the Australian War Memorial, Australian Research Council and Turkey’s Middle East Technical University (METU). Between 2007 and 2012, the project investigated and translated previously unexamined but comprehensive Turkish records of the campaign.

Once research began a huge volume of fascinating material emerged. It was a double-edged sword, though, as it would take a decade or more to comprehensively work through and translate the documents. Priority had to be given to the main strategically and tactically important conflicts of the campaign and, being an Australian-history project, the actions faced by ANZAC forces in the campaign’s major events took precedence. This book therefore focuses on six major stages: initial Ottoman defence tactics, their dispositions on the Gallipoli Peninsula, the response to the landings, the ensuing battle for the ANZAC sector in May, the August Offensive, and the Allied evacuation.

British sectors are not ignored, with chapters covering archival material relating to the British landings at Cape Helles and the Suvla Bay operations included. For reasons of space, though, previously published material from the Allied side is only briefly summarised in order to put the Ottoman actions into context and appears on a sans serif font. Readers can go to one or more of the one hundred-plus English-language books published about Gallipoli since 1915 to read alongside this one (see ‘Select Bibliography’). For the same reason, it has not been possible to describe and assess the impact on the outcomes at Gallipoli of Ottoman logistics (supplies, transport, etc.), as important as they are. The concentration is on battlefield events and operations.

The Ottoman documents used to tell the Turkish story include, among several types, the most useful divisional, regimental and battalion war diaries (called in Turkish, harp cerideler or war registers), battlefield reports and signals, Ottoman War Ministry communications, records of prisoner interrogations, aircraft logs and diaries, and First World War Turkish press reports. Other sources included published and unpublished memoirs and personal war diaries. The result is this narrative of events at Gallipoli completely from the Turkish perspective. My hope is to satisfy readers interested in furthering their understanding and knowledge of the Gallipoli Campaign, and how the Ottomans achieved their success at Gallipoli, how their commanders and troops responded to the invasion of their homeland and were able, under great pressure, to resist, persevere and ultimately succeed.

Harvey Broadbent

Sydney, 2015

Map 1 The Eastern Mediterranean in 1914

NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION AND DEFINITIONS

Apart from additional letters with accents, the modern Turkish alphabet has the same letters as the English alphabet. In some cases they are pronounced differently as follows:

The accented letters are as follows:

Turkish word definitions:

1

DRIFTING TO THE DARDANELLES

In November 1914 the First World War turned truly global. Great Britain, France and Russia had been fighting Germany and Austria-Hungary on the Western and Eastern fronts, respectively, since August. On 2 November 1914, as the convoy carrying the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) sent to join them was just one day out from Albany on the Indian Ocean, Russia declared war on the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Sultan and Caliph of Islam, Mehmed V, reciprocated by declaring war on Russia and her allies on 11 November and on 13 November, pronouncing it a jihad for all Moslems. Its text ran in part:

When the enemy attacks Islam, and attempts to invade and raid the country of Islam, and capture the people of Islam, if the Sultan of Islam orders mobilization for a war, should it not be an obligation for all the Muslims, young and old, to be ready to fight, as infantry and cavalry, with all their assets and lives pursuant to the Verse of the Koran which says, ‘Set off, light and heavy, and fight on the path of God with your assets and lives. If you only knew that this is more beneficial for you?’

The answer: It would be ‘God knows best’, written by Hayri Bin Avnî El-Ürgûbî.

Response in Moslem countries such as Egypt, India, Yemen and Saudi-Arabia was meagre, but the crumbling Ottoman Empire found itself committed to war on four fronts—Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus, Iraq, Syria and Palestine and the Dardanelles Strait. It was the defence of the latter, with its sea route to the Ottoman capital, Istanbul (Constantinople), that was to lead to the Gallipoli Campaign and the Ottoman ultimate victory there in 1915.

The Ottoman Empire

The origins of the six hundred-year-old Turkish Ottoman Empire, one of the world’s greatest-known empires, dated back to the early fourteenth century. It led Islam with its Sultan as Caliph from 1516, and as the new guardian of the holy places of Mecca and Medina. The empire reached its zenith under Suleyman the Magnificent (1520–66) and his immediate successors. A slow decline over two hundred years, as territory was lost, followed. By the 1890s the Ottomans, endeavouring to modernise and threatened by Russian expansionist ambitions, sought German assistance. The newly powerful, unified and ambitious Germany emerged and strutted upon the Ottoman stage. Major Colmar von der Goltz headed a German military mission to the Empire in 1885, replacing British and French contractors. Then in 1889 and 1898, Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Istanbul to strengthen financial and military relations.

Despotic Sultan Abdul Hamid (1876–1909) was forced to install a fledgling parliamentary system after an uprising in 1908 led by the so-called Young Turks, the Committee (later Party) of Union and Progress (CUP). Their three leading pashas, Enver, Talat and Cemal (Djemal), would become the wartime leaders six years later. In 1909 they replaced Abdul Hamid II with his more malleable cousin, Mehmet Reshad, who became Sultan Mehmet V and a figurehead monarch.

Ottoman territorial losses continued, with the Libyan coastal strip being annexed by Italy after a short campaign in 1911. The First Balkan War followed in October 1912 with Montenegro, Serbia Bulgaria and Greece pushing Ottoman forces back disastrously close to Istanbul, only sixty kilometres away, before the Turks rallied. The Serbs took Macedonia and the Greeks, Salonika. Turkey’s border now lay near Adrianople (Edirne). The Ottomans reacted by importing German, British and French military and financial advisors in 1913. The German Military Reform Commission led by General Otto Liman von Sanders soon emerged as the most far-reaching and influential. British Admiral Limpus and his seventy British officers exercised control of the Ottoman Navy but that suddenly and dramatically, but not unexpectedly, changed with the outbreak of war in August 1914.

The Ottomans choose sides

Germany won the diplomatic game to secure an alliance with the Ottomans. The Ottomans stayed nominally neutral at first but Britain confiscated two powerful dreadnoughts being built for Turkey in British shipyards at South Shields. The ships had been financed by public subscription throughout the Ottoman Empire and the effect on opinion, both public and political, in Turkey was to throw the Ottomans into the German embrace. Britain and her allies feared that, when completed and in Turkish hands, these dreadnoughts would not only secure the Straits but would dominate Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

Germany tightened the hug. Enver Pasha, as War Minister, the de facto military commander of Ottoman forces, was convinced that the Germans had superior military prowess and would best guarantee Ottoman territory against Britain’s ally Russia. The Ottoman Army was far from being prepared for war and needed time on its side. A German-Ottoman alliance was secretly signed on 2 August 1914, allowing time for Ottoman mobilisation to begin. On 3 August, as war was erupting in Europe, Enver ordered the mining of the southern end of the Dardanelles Strait and the northern end of the Bosphorus. All Russia’s grain exports and half of its other exports were now bottled up in the Black Sea. Events that would lead to the Ottoman entry into the war now speeded up as the British were failing in their attempts to ensure Ottoman neutrality.

On 10 August the Germans delivered the old battleships Goeben and Breslau, as ‘replacements’ for the confiscated dreadnoughts, to the entrance of the Dardanelles. Ignoring the treaty that prevented warships sailing through the Strait, Enver sent an order to allow them passage through to Istanbul. There, German crews exchanged their caps for fezzes and the ships were renamed Yavuz and Midilli. In these actions, Enver was forcing the issue, ignoring the ‘neutralists’ in parliament and taking his country one step away from involvement in the new war.

The Kaiser, adding external pressure, offered a timely large loan on 5 October, coupled with the extraordinary declaration to join the jihad, as a friend of all Moslems. The Ottoman government then suspended all foreign debt repayments and unilaterally abolished the hated free trade concessions to European countries, known as the Capitulations. On 29 October German Admiral Souchon, who had replaced British Admiral Limpus and was now Ottoman Navy Commander-in-Chief, led the Yavuz and Midilli up into the Black Sea and shelled the Russian ports but only caused minimal damage. It was enough to bring the Russian declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire on 2 November.

Germany had taken advantage of the Turkish fears of Russian ambitions. For Germany it meant the Turks could look after their interests in the region, keeping significant British naval and military forces engaged and away from the Western Front. Military measures were accelerated on all sides from November 1914, with the Ottomans openly in the war. Following Russian ground attacks in the Caucasus on 1 November 1914 an Anglo-French squadron of eighteen ships bombarded Turkish fixed fortifications at the entrance to the Dardanelles Strait on 3 November. It appears it was to test the Ottoman defences, and the results were deceptively encouraging for the British. In a 20-minute bombardment on the fort at Seddülbahir at the tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula, a single shell struck the magazine. Ten guns were dislodged though not destroyed but eighty-six Ottoman soldiers were killed and total casualties reached about 150, including forty Germans. Nothing more was achieved except that the attention of the Ottomans was drawn towards strengthening their defences. They set about expanding the minefield and reinforcing the Strait’s military and naval defences. The prelude to the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign had begun.

Defending the Dardanelles Strait

Defensive improvements of the Strait area now moved ahead a pace. An important veteran of the Balkan War, Major General Mehmed Esat, had been appointed Commander of the III Corps. He was tasked with defence of the Gallipoli Peninsula alongside the Strait Fortified Area Command. III Corps comprised the 7th, 8th and 9th divisions, but the 8th had been detached and sent to Sinai. The reconstructed 19th Division was sent in its place to join the 9th on the southern section of the Peninsula to fulfil the role of reserve division in the Strait. The 7th was deployed at the neck of the Peninsula at the Bulair (Bolayir) lines by the Gulf of Saros.

For the naval defences German assistance was sought from their naval mission. In attempted secrecy, six hundred German defence specialists were sent to assist the Turks with mine, gunnery, fortifications and torpedo warfare for the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus. This led to considerably extending the minefield as well as improving and updating shore fortifications, including the strengthening of the forts with their 12- and 15-inch cannons. Improvements to the Strait’s defences were overseen by Cevat (Djevat) Pasha, Turkish Commander of Strait’s Forts, and Germans Vice Admiral Guido von Usedom and his No. 2, Vice Admiral Merten. This split command, a result of the Ottoman-German alliance, was not always advantageous as various tensions down the command chain occurred from time to time.

By December 1914, the drift to the Dardanelles conflict became a stronger current. Russia began to question its participation in the war. It was teetering on the Eastern Front after major defeats at Tannenburg and the Masurian Lakes in late August and September 1914. Growing fears of the Ottomans in the Caucasus now meant an already stretched Russia had to open a second front. Large numbers of troops would need to be deployed there. The Russian Bear turned to the British Lion for help. Another front in the south against Turkey would prevent the Ottomans sending overwhelming troop numbers to deal with the Russians in the Caucasus. Heavy lobbying of the British began in political and diplomatic circles. By January 1915 Russia had played her ace—help us or we’ll pull out.

The threat was a separate armistice with Germany, a horrific scenario for the British and French. If that happened they would face the German Eastern Front Army massively redeployed to France and Flanders—easily enough to break the stalemate there. With a promise of a second front, and something of a prayer, the Allied strategy of a naval attack up the Dardanelles Strait was developed. At first it was to be the navy alone as British war minister, Lord Kitchener, had few troops to spare. He had earmarked his best division, the 29th, for bolstering numbers in France. The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) divisions, then training in Egypt, could be used as follow-up troops to garrison occupied territory when the Ottomans surrendered.

The general plan, or theory, was for the fleet to sail to Istanbul, threaten the capital and demand surrender from the Ottomans. Tactically, the first step was to open the Strait to the Sea of Marmara by destroying the Turkish guns at the entrance and silencing the shore batteries. Then the forts at the Narrows would be destroyed and, most importantly, the rows of mines in the Narrows and the approach would be swept.

On 25 February the batteries and forts at the Strait’s entrance were destroyed, Turkish batteries being out of range to return effective fire. Allied landing parties at Seddülbahir and Kum Kale on 26 February then destroyed large guns before being forced to withdraw. Ominously, however, British minesweepers, crewed by British fishermen recruited for the purpose, were constantly repulsed by shore howitzer fire and the Turks were able to replace any swept mines at night. Despite this setback, the British Admiralty pushed the naval squadron commander, Vice Admiral Carden, ignoring his growing anxiety, to plan a major naval assault in March. After Carden suffered a nervous breakdown, Sir John de Robeck assumed naval command on 16 March and set down plans for the attack to clear the Strait and push through on 18 March.

By 1915, though, the Ottoman defences had been substantially developed along the 35-nautical mile-long Strait. Based on the November experience, Cevat Pasha considered the vulnerability of the outer forts was not to be easily put right. They were expendable. His three sector defensive system, ‘Outer’, ‘Intermediate’ and ‘Inner’ forts, meant that the balance of defensive strength was shifted to the Intermediate and then the Inner forts as events necessitated.

The main Turkish defence was the extended minefield concentrated at the Narrows. Eleven main lines were laid across the Strait near the Narrows, containing a total of 399 mines, by 18 March. The sea-based defences were supported by nine shore-based artillery divisions. In addition to mines at the Narrows, three 18-inch torpedo tubes were installed on the pier at Kilitbahir, giving field of fire across the Strait at virtually point-blank range. Twenty-four mobile howitzers were positioned along both sides of the Strait. They could be moved from one position to another, dragged by oxen teams to avoid the enemy getting a fix on them. Smoke canisters were used at various intervals to confuse the enemy gunners and draw fire away from the mobile batteries. The howitzers fired on enemy ships to keep them moving so no concentration of fire onto the forts could be achieved.

A critical event took place a few days before 18 March that would have great repercussions during the Allied naval assault. Undetected by the British fleet and their aerial reconnaissance, the Nusret minelayer laid the eleventh line of twenty-six mines at a hundred metres apart in Erenköy Bay under cover of night. This little vessel has now entered Turkish folklore and stands in a place of honour against the jetty of the small maritime museum at Çanakkale. The mine line it laid was to cause the ultimate loss of Allied ships Bouvet and Inflexible.

In Turkey, to the present day, 18 March 1915 is commemorated as the date of a great victory in Turkish history. De Robeck and the Allied fleet, led by the Queen Elizabeth, the newest of all dreadnoughts, failed to neutralise the Intermediate and Inner forts on 18 March. After initial passage past the Outer forts in the morning, the assaulting squadron began to flounder around 1.45 p.m., when the French battleship Gaulois was suddenly retreating, holed under the waterline. Then at 2 p.m. another French battleship, the Bouvet, swinging round to starboard after firing, struck one of the mines laid by the Nusret in Erenköy Bay. She rolled over and sank with only twenty of her 603 crew being rescued. Despite several hits on forts, the Turkish mines, supported by batteries, were determining the outcome. Four other battleships were then put out of action— the British Inflexible and Irresistable from mines, the latter with 168 men lost before she sank, the Ocean and the French Suffren from shellfire. With the Ottoman defenders scoring 139 direct hits out of 1600 rounds fired, it was sufficient to end the naval attempt, which de Robeck called off after several shells had hit the Queen Elizabeth.

Map 2 The Dardanelles defences

The map shows the full details of the Ottoman defences, including the lines of mines, the main forts (listed with their artillery deployments) and the mobile howitzer numbers and positions (indicated by the triangles). Source: TGS History

The Turkish forts and batteries remained operational despite the weight and volume of enemy fire. Total Turkish losses were estimated at four officers and twenty-two men killed, one officer and fifty-two men wounded, one German officer wounded, three Germans killed and fourteen wounded. This ‘butchers’ bill’ was extremely small compared with the Allied losses of about eight hundred sailors. Contrary to some accounts, the Ottoman artillery ammunition supply was not near to expiration by the end of the Allied naval action.

The armies take over

Furious debates in London followed these events, culminating in the British decision to land an army to take the forts. Sanguine Allied attitudes about the Ottoman Army began to govern the rushed planning of the military campaign. In the light of its defeat in the Balkan Wars the European powers considered the Ottoman Army to be a spent force of little value, a serious underestimation based on poor intelligence. Notice should have been taken of a few facts. The German Military Mission had been assisting in the training of the Ottoman Army, undergoing modernisation since 1882, both tactically and structurally, at all levels. The brightest Ottoman officers in training were sent to the German War Academy in Berlin to complete studies. The Balkan War defeat had only served to speed up reforms and more intensive restructuring under von Sanders’ Military Mission. Officers who had proved the most competent during the Balkan Wars were promoted to replace around 1300 senior officers, who were retired. Training emphasis was on maintaining aggressive tactics, hard practice, proving efficiency before appointment to units and strong leadership from the front.

After the 18 March naval battle, the Fifth Army was created to defend Gallipoli, incorporating Esat Pasha’s III Corps, bringing the complete Ottoman Army to a total of six armies. Otto Liman von Sanders was appointed Fifth Army Commander, with Turkish Lieutenant Colonel Kâzim as his Chief of Staff, an essential and important link between the German command and their Turkish counterparts in the field. An army is usually only as efficient as its logistics, so the rush to improve all transport, supplies and their routes after 18 March picked up speed. It was now a close run race to secure the Peninsula against the enemy.

The Allied Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF), including the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), had begun arriving on Lemnos Island from 12 March under General Officer Commanding, Sir Ian Hamilton. It was to occupy the Gallipoli Peninsula after the navy’s success. That was now a forlorn hope and the MEF was to invade the Peninsula and knockout the forts alongside the Strait. Only then would the navy sweep the minefield at the Narrows unmolested, pass through to the Sea of Marmara and on to Istanbul. Preparations took thirty-six days and the delay was a boon for the Ottoman defensive improvements.

After sea-to-shore observations and some basic aerial reconnaissance, a final plan was drawn up using multiple landings to reach and occupy the forts and batteries on the northern shore of the Dardanelles. The plan included a feint landing at Bulair (Turkish ‘Bolayir’) on the Gulf of Saros to keep von Sanders guessing and major concentrations of Turks away from the south of the Peninsula. A detachment of the French Division would also carry out a decoy landing on the Asian side at Kum Kale and Besike Bay to keep the Ottoman 3rd and 11th divisions located there away from the Peninsula. The French would then withdraw after a suitable time.

The main landings on the Peninsula itself were to take place just before and at dawn in the hope of achieving maximum surprise. There was to be no single concentrated attack. Six small beaches were chosen from where the Allied force would advance in concert towards the objectives. Five of the beaches were around the toe of the Peninsula at Cape Helles for the main thrust, code-named, from east to west, S, V, W, X and Y beaches. The sixth beach, Z Beach, was further north. It was longer but equally narrow, just north of the promontory of Kabatepe. The MEF landings were planned thus:

Cape Helles: the British 29th Division, (the main thrust).

      Initial objective: the prominent 180-metre high point of Achi Baba, several kilometres northeast of the Helles beaches adjacent to the village of Krithia.

      Landings at 5.30 a.m. S, V, W, X and Y beaches.

1 kilometre north of Kabatepe promontory: the ANZAC (2 Divisions) to land an hour before the 29th Division at 4.30 a.m.

      Initial objective: To keep the Ottoman 19th Division and northern units of the 9th Division away from the Helles operation. In the process to take the Sari Bair ridge to Hill 971, Koja Chimen Tepe, then push down towards the Strait to Maltepe hill to then provide a pincer movement, cutting off the Ottoman 9th Division and forming an attacking front to the forts and batteries from the north.

Opposing the MEF would be the Ottoman Fifth Army consisting of six main infantry divisions (12,000 troops each) and supplementary forces. Each division had three infantry regiments, each having three battalions of 1100 troops divided into four rifle companies and one field artillery regiment of twenty-four guns. Additional units for each division were one cavalry squad and one company each of engineer, medical and transport personnel.

The Ottoman armies had separate machine-gun branches using German Maxim guns. Each infantry regiment had one machine-gun company with four guns attached. They used four guns as a single battery sometimes split into two platoons. Artillery was a mixture of heavy guns, from old late-nineteenth century 87-mm field guns (with a range to 6800 metres) to more modern German Krupp QF 75-mm field-and-mountain guns (with ranges between 5900 and 4800 metres respectively). Each artillery battalion had eight guns in two batteries of four guns with three battalions per regiment.

Commander von Sanders therefore had just over 80,000 troops to deploy. How and where he positioned his divisions numerically would greatly affect the Allied potential for success. On taking command von Sanders changed the previous dispositions established under the command of the Turkish Forts Commander, Brigadier-General Cevat Pasha. In doing so he also changed the defensive tactics. Cevat and Esat had originally positioned the troops to prevent and block any enemy amphibious disembarkation on likely landing beaches, with large force groups being placed on each of them. They were to crush the enemy while he was still struggling at sea to get ashore. But von Sanders thought this was risky if these landing places were not chosen by the enemy, which had 220 kilometres or so of the Peninsula’s Aegean coastline and the Asian side of the Straits to choose from.

The Turks knew the Allies were coming but not where General Hamilton was finally going to land his army. So von Sanders was facing the classic difficulty of defending a long coastline with insufficient forces and resources to deploy in depth. His assessments of likely landing spots based on surveillance of British warships proved sound enough as he settled on all the spots that Hamilton and his staff were considering. His dilemma though remained: how to cover them effectively.